


Damned

by CalamityBean



Category: Taboo (TV 2017)
Genre: And the canon Sharing of the Bed, Basically my version of how they met at seminary, Blood, Boarding School, Crossdressing, First Meetings, Godders you poor puppy you never stood a chance, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 06:37:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9479645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityBean/pseuds/CalamityBean
Summary: After Delaney leaves the molly house, Godfrey thinks back to the first time he and James shared a bed.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm furious at myself for so predictably falling in love with this ship. Had to get this out of my head, so I hope y'all enjoy!
> 
> Some notes about the timeline in here: According to Wilton's report in episode 1, James was sent to seminary in 1798, started raising hell in 1800, and took himself off to Africa in 1802. He was 11 when he started there and thus would've been about 15 when he left — which gave me a younger age window than I'd originally wanted for this fic, but oh well! (I thought age 13 a bit young to be "breaking necks," but okay, Taboo. Sure.) The point is that in the flashback depicted here, James would be about 14 years old. Dear Godders, I've decided, would be about 13, just because Edward Hogg is about a year younger than Tom Hardy IRL. In fact, yesterday was Edward Hogg's birthday! Happy birthday, dude.

Blood—like all taboos—tastes exquisite and false.

After Delaney has gone, Godfrey, to his credit, does not break. Here in the privacy of this candlelit room, he could throw himself on the bed if he liked, could sob into the pillow, weep with fear and embarrassment till his lungs shudder breathlessly and his ribs ache from straining against his stays … But he has not survived this long by wearing his heart on his sleeve. Instead, he remains precisely where Delaney left him. Shoulders slumped, arse perched on the edge of the bed, throat tight and peruke half fallen from his head, such that its curls tumble into his eyes. The pound, too, remains where Delaney left it, glimmering in the candle’s light. For hours, it seems, he sits there, listening to the revelry filtering up through the floorboards without really registering a sound … and staring, through bleary eyes, at that coin. Not till his mouth blooms with the taste of copper and a sharp, stinging pain does he realize he’s been biting his lip hard enough to burst.

Red on his fingertips. Deeper and wetter than the rouge painted laboriously along the line of his lips. An urge surges in him, inexplicable, to smear the blood atop the rouge, to lick it off his fingertip and return to the revelry with gore on his mouth in search of a man bold enough to suck it from his tongue—

Godfrey jerks his head. A gulp of sherry to drown his tongue in syrup, and then he stumbles to the basin, refusing to look in the glass.

His ceruse must be cracking by now, to judge by how dry his face feels, how stiff with paint and tears. Even his eyelashes feel so brittle he fears he may shatter if he so much as blinks. _Like stone_ , he thinks, cupping his hands in the basin. The reflection that peers back at him is ghastly white save for the streaks of khol running down its cheeks. _Like the statues flanking the chapel at seminary, archangels crumbling beneath centuries of weather and moss._ He splashes water over face, over neck, over hair, uncaring of how it trickles down his collarbone into the hollow between sternum and busk. He’d shared a name with one of those angels, not that any of his schoolmates had cared enough to ask his Christian name or to remember it if he told them. But the angels had taught him one thing, at least: the secret to surviving seminary.

_Stay still. Stay silent. Be invisible in plain sight_.

When Delaney saw him in the brothel, sitting there with his spine stuck rigid by whalebone and his skin powdered paler than death, had he thought Godfrey a statue for true? Uprooted from some overgrown garden and discarded here among the silk?

_One covered in pigeon shit, perhaps,_ he thinks wryly, wiping his face and grimacing at the lead-white paint that comes away on his hand. In the white: a streak of red. Rouge, he tells himself. Not blood. But his smile falters even so.

_I will protect you. You are not going to be caught, because I will protect you,_ Delaney had promised with his arm draped over his shoulders, the weight of it at once a comfort and a threat. And Godfrey had not added, though part of him yearned to: _Like before?_

 

\--- Woolwich, 1801 ---

 

“GODFREY! Oi! Godfrey! Where you off to?”

Laughter, horrid and raucous, like the screaming of a murder of crows, bounced through the seminary halls.

“Oh, c’mon, Godfrey, we didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Come on, let’s be friends, yeah? It’s just a bit of fun!”

With all respect due to his superiors, the blood dripping from Godfrey’s nostril begged to differ. It pooled in the bow of his upper lip as he dashed through the halls and coated his teeth with the thin taste of copper and salt. Never before had he tasted— _truly_ tasted—his own blood. Never from more than a papercut or a pulled tooth. Somehow, it wasn’t as disgusting as he’d have thought. If asked before that night, he supposed he’d have imagined it would taste horrible, nauseating, bad enough to make him wretch if he had to swallow more than a drop. Perhaps it would have, if he weren’t currently so occupied with running for his life.

They had caught him in the courtyard, the older boys. Foolish, foolish, sneaking out after curfew, when the price for getting caught by instructors was a lashing, and the older boys—the ensigns and other petty officers, who got _bunks_ to sleep in, and real food in the mess—went carousing for their women and their wine … But he still had trouble sleeping in the great hall, shivering in a pile with a hundred other boys like pups in a litter. He could hardly even _breathe_. Not with his coat so thin and his heart so heavy with thoughts of home. So long as one could bear the bite of autumn, there was a crispness to the sky at night that made his skin feel almost the right size.

From their perch by the chapel, the archangels had watched him watch the stars. They had watched the ensigns approach … drunk … cocksure … their blood running hot … and had looked on without comment as Godfrey flattened himself into the ivy and tried to become one with the courtyard wall. _Still, silent, invisible_ , he’d told himself, trying to draw strength from the angels above. _Like Gabriel. Like Uriel. Like Michael, the bravest of all._

Some help Michael had been when the ensigns boxed his nose.

So he ran, because what else could he do against three officers years his senior, born with silver spoons under their tongues? They were only third or fourth sons of lords, not destined for real wealth or power—but lords’ sons they were, and he but a clerk’s. There was a natural order to such things, as old as predator and prey, and as familiar to his feet as to the hammering of his heart. Breathless, he careened around a corner, following blindly wherever his feet led, the other boys’ jeers chasing him ever and ever closer behind, until at last he stumbled through a doorway and fell to hands and knees in the great hall.

There he froze, crouched on flagstones hard and cold. The hearths that flickered on either side of the vast room cast more shadows than light. In their unsteady glow, he could just make out the bodies: a hundred boys between the ages of ten and sixteen snoring fitfully in a heap, sprawled across coats and blankets and cots.

To a swaggering swarm of drunks: a minefield. But to a half-starved boy in soft, threadbare shoes? A briarpatch. Ideal for throwing off the hunt. With the hounds baying at his back, Godfrey scrambled inside.

And when the ensigns reached the doorway and shouted, “Godfrey! Come on, we’ve not got all night!”, he threw his last scrap of caution to the wind and dove beneath the nearest blanket, wrenching it over his head—

—and recoiling from the shock of hot skin he found beneath it, from the way the sleeper startled into wakefulness with a grunt.

“The fuck you think you’re…”

“Shh!” pled Godfrey, plastered up against his bedmate’s back. A broad back, and even through the muslin, very warm. His fingertips curled in that shirt. “Please, I only—forgive me, but—”

“Godders! Where have you _gone?”_ cried Lord Farrington’s son, so plaintive and playful that his friends all laughed. The minefield proved less amused. Cadets were stirring, grumbling curses, questions, orders to _stop that damn racket_ , didn’t they know the _time_ —but he doubted any of them would dare do more than grumble. Not against the gentry.

“We’re only looking for Godfrey,” another—Haversham, Godfrey thought—assured too sweetly. With each repetition of his name, his heart dropped. “He was meant to meet us, you see. Just need our dear Godders, then we’ll be on our way.”

Wonderful. Brilliant. Now the entire seminary would want _his_ head for this, and the ensigns would walk free. Miserable, Godfrey squeezed shut his eyes, waiting for his bedmate to tear the blanket away and throw him to the wolves.

But the boy beside him did not move. Did not speak. Did not even seem to breathe. He was listening, Godfrey realized; not as a cadet listens for orders, but as a cat listens for a mouse in the hayloft, its tail twitching but muscles deceptively relaxed. Slowly, he slid down beneath the blankets, and when he rolled over, Godfrey’s blood ran cold.

A hint of wide cheekbones. A curve of full lips, pressed rigidly flat. The mouth alone he would have recognized, even had shadow hid all the rest. His first week at seminary, he had watched that mouth twist into a snarl as it shouted rebellion and mutiny, its owner standing on a table like a pirate king as he stirred the whole mess hall into a riot. Over _custard,_ Godfrey learned later, after his nerves had settled from the shock. Since then, he had heard other things about the boy, too, rumors of deeds darker than a kettle of custard thrown down the stairs … Arson and brawling and worse. To Godfrey’s recollection, they had never so much as exchanged words. But everyone in the seminary knew James Delaney.

His eyes, pits. Too deep in shadow to make out, but that stare pinned him all the same. Leaning close, the boy sniffed him— _sniffed,_ like a dog!—and Godfrey flinched as he reached out a hand. Iron fingers snagged his chin before he could turn away. The pad of a thumb on his upper lip, callused, rough; smearing through the blood pooled in his philtrum, making him whimper as it grazed his nose. Brusquely, Delaney released his jaw. Then he stared in silence at the blood smeared all over that thumb as though he’d never seen anything like it before.

And Godfrey knew even then that he would take to his grave the memory of James Delaney’s full, full lips closing around that thumb and sucking the blood from it as Godfrey lay pressed against him in bed.

Godfrey swallowed. So did Delaney. Then he dumped the blankets full onto Godfrey’s head and sat up with his elbows on his knees.

“Out,” he ordered, and even so young, his voice was like the grating of stones. Godfrey’s heart stuttered. From the way the laughter at the front of the hall suddenly cut to silence, however, he realized Delaney was not speaking to him. “All of you, out. Your Godfrey is not here.”

“Delaney?” He dared to think that a note of caution in Haversham’s voice. “This doesn’t concern you. Go back to sleep.”

“It concerns me that I _cannot_ sleep over your yammering,” Delaney growled. He had a strange, stilted way of speaking— _mumbling_ , really, though it carried better than a mumble ought. Or perhaps he was simply one of those boys for whom others naturally fell silent. “So do us all a kindness, and shut your fucking claps.”

Farrington gasped.

“How dare you speak to me that way! Do you have any idea who my father is, boy?”

The mattress shifted. Godfrey held his breath as, slowly, Delaney stood.

He couldn’t have had much more than a year on Godfrey. A year, and no height, and up against three older boys born with lands and titles to their names. Yet there was silence. Godfrey wondered if they too had heard the rumors about the officer who’d flogged Delaney for not saluting, and then fallen from the topsail rigging the next day.

“...Come, Farry.” Haversham’s voice was almost too soft to hear. “Forget the boy. I’ve a room reserved on Chancery, and the women won’t wait all night.”

Footsteps. As their echoes faded down the hall, Delaney settled back onto the bed.

Delaney didn’t reach for the blanket again, but nor did he show any sign of remembering that it was occupied. Godfrey waited for the dismissal; the unceremonious shove onto the floor. “Thank you,” he whispered when it did not come, and the other boy grunted in response.

“Your nose. Broken?”

“I—I think not. Only bloodied somewhat. I’ve had worse.” Another grunt. Godfrey couldn’t tell whether Delaney was pleased or disappointed by the news. He dared to peek out of the blanket as far as his nose. “My name is Michael—”

“Godfrey. Yes. I know who you are. As you know who I am, I think.” There was no safe answer to that. “Those boys, they give you trouble before?”

To that, Godfrey’s silence proved answer enough.

“…They give you trouble,” Delaney said without looking at him, face toward the ceiling and eyes closed, “you come to me. Yes? You come and you tell me, and there will not be trouble again.”

“Why?” The thought of being indebted overwhelmed him; the knowledge of the favors demanded of the weak by the strong almost choked him with fear. Not since he was a small child had _anything_ come without a price. “What do you want?”

Delaney groaned. “To get some _fucking sleep!”_

Despite himself, Godfrey laughed. The shape of a smile felt unfamiliar on his face.

A heavy hand fell awkwardly in the general vicinity of his head, half pat and half shove—Godfrey couldn’t tell which and found he hardly cared. “Sleep, Godders,” sighed Delaney, and on his lips, that nickname, that familiar torment, did not sound quite so … But that was a dangerous thought, Delaney’s lips. He forced it from his mind as he nested into the scant space left on the cot.

In a year, Delaney would be gone.

In a year, Delaney would set sail on a ship called _Cornwallis_ and then sink with one called _Influence_ , and by the time the news reached London, Godfrey would have learned better how to bar all emotion from his face. He did not weep for James Delaney. _Would_ not weep for James Delaney. Why should he weep for a half-mad hellion who’d promised to protect him, only to leave him behind?

_Tonight_ , however. Just for tonight, Godfrey allowed himself to rest his forehead against the shoulder at his side. And with an ache in his nose and Delaney’s skin hot on his, he slept.

 

\---

 

After Delaney has gone, Godfrey pockets the pound. It means nothing. It is neither promise nor payment; it is not acceptance of his role. It is simply a coin in a whorehouse, and only a fool would leave so much money behind.

How simple it has become, these days, to be false. Wipe the khol from his eyelids, scrub the ceruse from his skin, unravel the ribbon from round his throat, drag a deep and grateful breath as his fingers unlace the stays, and by the time he slips out through the back-alley door, Godfrey is an ordinary man again: young, unremarkable, with starved cheeks and fever-bright eyes. He hurries hunched through the London drizzle like a thousand other vultures in identical black coats. Of each passerby, he wonders what their stiffly starched cravats hide. If a butcher were to peel away their skin, would they look the same within as without? Would he? And is it the cravat that shows his true face, or the purple satin and peruke—or neither, his sunlit and moonlit lives equally truth and lie?

Still, silent, and invisible, he sits at his desk while the Company talks. His pen scratches; his mind drifts. Shipping lanes. Trade agreements. The inflating price of tea. Pettifer lifts his hand, and Godfrey lowers his pen, closing his eyes against the words.

_Found by the river … throat torn out … like some sort of beast, they say…_

_No great loss. Only a Malay…_

_Crabs in his belly, heart eaten out—do you think—_

_Ha! Like the rumors? Been listening to too much gossip, Appleby. Delaney’s an animal, but he’s not…_

_Though the will does buy him time—_

_But only time. Delaney will be dead soon enough._ Sir Strange speaks with the air of a man accustomed to seeing his words become fact. Godfrey wishes it were as easy not to listen as not to see. For if he listens, he must _tell,_ and if he tells, he is damned—damned as surely as he had been the first time he painted his face and wound a ribbon around his throat.

The first time he donned a gown, the greatest shock had been how simple it was. No one stopped him. No god smote him. No lightning came from the sky. Nothing within him rebelled in revulsion at the sight of his reflection draped in satin and skirts. The only difficult part had been lacing up the stays. He’d felt almost cheated, that it should feel so … _right_. For was sin not supposed to feel as dangerous as it did delicious? Was succumbing to temptation not supposed to send a thrill through him of equal parts revulsion and delight? Else why would it be forbidden? Why would it be taboo?

All those nights spent sleepless with guilt and self-hatred; all those Saturday midnights with his nose pressed into a pillow, biting his lip to keep from crying out, followed by Sunday mornings chewing that lip again as he listens to the minister’s words, all the dark secluded fumblings in shadowed corners at seminary, kisses hard as punches, fingers pulling at his scalp, knees chafing on flagstones—all the pain worth it for the way his tongue made the other boy moan—all natural, all normal, all so easy to slip down into, rung by rung, because the terrible truth about damnation and blood alike is that they taste of almost nothing at all. As though his body is so filled with both that he can no longer distinguish them from himself. A thin tang of copper; a faint sting of salt; like sweat, like spit, like tears, like cum, like the seawater Delaney must have gagged on as the _Influence_ sank beneath the waves. Like the cold, metallic weight of a pound sterling upon Godfrey’s tongue.

As though that were necessary. As though his words had not been bought and paid for over a decade ago, in James Delaney’s bed.

Cannibal, they call him. Animal. Brute.

How exquisite that mouth must have looked, thinks Godfrey, smeared with the Malay’s blood.

“Dear lord, Godfrey,” laughs Wilton after the meeting is done, while the other board members are filtering out and the clerk is straightening his desk. So accustomed is he to being invisible that he nearly drops his notes. “Are you _bleeding?”_

Only then does he notice the pain. When he touches his lip, his fingers come away red. “I … It appears so. I must have bit it, I suppose.”

Wilton smirks. Wilton, Godfrey knows, is no higher born than he. But the way he speaks, the sly swagger of it, reminds him of boys he knew long ago. “How _revolting_. Well, clean it up, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, sir. Apologies. Of course.”

Not until Wilton has turned away does Godfrey lick the blood from his thumb.

**Author's Note:**

> ...Don't really know what to say about this except that I hope someone out there liked it! I'd really love to hear what you thought, or just to talk about Taboo in general, so comments are greatly appreciated. And if you're the Tumblring sort, feel free to hit me up over there at [calamity-bean](http://calamity-bean.tumblr.com). I've yet to meet ANYONE in the Taboo fandom there and it's killing me, please talk to me about this damn show.
> 
> Michael is Godfrey's first name as given by the BBC website, so I rolled with that.


End file.
